Is this the world's worst novel?

I have this Ira Glass quote stuck on my cork board (or, as my inside voice wankily calls it, ‘the inspiration station’):

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Ira Glass has obviously never read the novel I wrote when I was in my late teens. Sure, he’s right about a few things; my work disappointed me, and it definitely wasn’t that good. And I never got past that phase, because I did quit. I did a lot of work, but I quit. My work has never been as good as my ambitions, and I don’t think I’ve ever closed that gap, though I finish stories.

People think The Shining is about a haunted hotel. It isn’t. It’s about writer’s block. Jack Torrance, clacking away at his typewriter, going slowly mad. I wonder if the snowbound Overlook Hotel becomes a metaphor for the isolation and loneliness of trying (and failing) to write a book.

Even when I had three months (THREE!) to do nothing but write, I still couldn’t do it. There became so many more tempting things to do. But as a teenager, and in my early twenties, I couldn’t stop writing. I didn’t have a computer then, so I wrote long hand in wire bound notebooks, typing up and printing out pages when I had a late shift at my reception job. I wrote so much that I developed this weird little lump on the second finger of my right hand (it’s still there, to remind me I don’t write that much anymore.)

This massive pile of notebooks and loose sheets was actually my second attempt at a novel. I am not even sure what order they go in, and I doubt I could tell from trying to piece together the plot. From what I remember, there was a teenage girl, an inappropriate relationship with a much older man (MUCH older, don’t know why I did that.) unrequited love, and two dead rock stars sent to torment our heroine into sorting her life out. Magic realism written by a 17 year old isn’t going to be any good, but thanks for the encouragement, Ira.

2,000 pages of crap

Don't make notebooks like they used to

I found this scribbled in an old diary: ‘the only thing I write these days is shopping lists.’ It's the sort of thing that at the time I think is pithy and witty, but it's really just lame and unfunny.

So when the muse is failing to crap on my head, or I’m feeling a little spooked out from the posts about missing people and unsolved deaths, I’ll post a chapter of the Not So Great English Novel. (it had two titles, neither of which were any good, ‘The People vs Alice Same, and I Wish My Friends Were Someone Else’s) E.L James, prepare to surrender your crown as The World’s Worst Writer. 

Undated Mad Rant

A little light relief from the weird and creepy stuff I normally write about, some teenage ramblings. Hashtag: cringe.

Found: in the box of shame, locked away since we partied like it was 1999.

Date: circa 1991 -1998

Circumstance: Who knows? Possibly a school trip, or disappointing family holiday. We stayed in one place where there was a very creepy dining-room. The floor was black, polished wood. There were many glass fronted cabinets filled with stuffed animals and fake flowers. There was an impressive collection of well-thumbed Jilly Cooper paperbacks. The owner said (imagine cryptic, crystal-gazing voice) ‘No one goes in the DINING-ROOM’.

I don’t think this is that holiday. What is certain is that my sense of social injustice, and indeed accommodation benchmark standards, were a bit skewed. There certainly wasn’t any of the things in the school toilets as described, with the exception of the occasional droplet of wee on the toilet. seat. You have to assume the rest was included for dramatic effect.

After my stay here (all 3 hours of it) I have decided that this is the most disgusting, flea-ridden, repulsive, sweaty, shit-infested bog-water arsehole piss-bucket I have EVER had the displeasure to see in my LIFE! Yes, EVEN my school toilets which have shit up the walls and piss on the floor / dead people hanging from the ceiling / blood, shit and all kinds of disgusting things in the sink – and that’s just the TEACHER’s loos.

And you look like the type of person that would irritate the hell out of me, you stupid old tart. This place stinks of fucking mothballs and fucking cat’s piss and dog’s shit. The bath is the size of MY BABRBIE HAS A BATH set, only fucking smaller. The taps DO NOT WORK, we are dying from carbon monoxide POISONING and I can hear what people in the next STREET are saying – oh, and talking of the ‘town’ it’s like the one in Amityville / Elm Street, only worse, cause the houses don’t look as nice, the houses looks like fucking industrial fucking concrete from World War fucking 2.

I HATE IT. I wish that I was in Prague, I am sure it would be more PRETTY than THIS! Am I making myself clear, you rip-off bitch? There’s a massive fucking spider the size of AMERICA crawling across the wall, like it’s going to TAKE OVER the fucking world or something.

Am I ranting? You bet I FUCKIN AM!!! I want to go home. And so you know where home is? CHESHAM, the epitome of crap. And I want to go BACK!

Anyway, I have to go. I’ve got some bogarts to tame, some fleas to catch, a tent to sleep in. A portaloo at Glastonbury would be better than this. What’s the point of the empty cabinets? Eh? And the SHITE furniture? There’s small animals living in the mattresses! I bet your house is dead nice, isn’t it? I bet you’ve got a nice TV and a proper bath and cupboards that don’t look like something out of TACK EMPORIUM CO, eh? Huh, huh huh? Cause you’ve got lots of money earned from shite accommodation like THIS. 

Where is.....Lars Mittank?

Lars Mittank has been missing since 8 July 2014, when he vanished from Bulgaria’s Varna airport.

The 28 year old German and his friends had travelled to Bulgaria on 30 June.  They checked into the Viva Hotel, in the seaside town of Golden Sands.  The town is 17km along the coast from the large port city of Varna and is popular with young European tourists who come to enjoy the nightlife, beaches and cheap booze.

Lars apparently got into two fights during the holiday; one during a day at the beach and one outside a McDonalds after a night out. One of these fights was with rival Bayern Munich fans (Lars supported Werder Bremen) and during one of the altercations, he damaged an eardrum.

Lars saw a doctor, was prescribed the antibiotic Cefuroxime 500, and was advised not to fly home on the scheduled date. His friends flew home as planned, and Lars checked into Kolor, a cheap hostel in the centre of Varna.

That night he phoned his mother, telling her he believed that he was being followed by four men who wanted to know ‘what the tablets were’. He asked her to cancel his credit cards, and said he was afraid because there was something strange about the hostel. He later texted her, asking ‘What is Cefuroxime 500?’

His mother booked him plane tickets home for the following day, 8 July.

The next morning, Lars made his way by taxi to the airport. He walked into the terminal with his holdall and back pack, and after a brief exchange with a woman (who looks like she might be airport staff) made his way to the doctor’s office.

CCTV captured Lars sprinting out of the doctor’s office approximately 46 minutes later; this sudden dash was apparently prompted by the appearance of  a mysterious ‘maintenance man’. It’s unclear if the maintenance man had accessed the consultation room or just the reception area, but either way, his presence was enough to spook Lars into running away.

 The CCTV shows Lars running back out into the terminal, before it picks him up running around outside, where he slows to a jog, pauses,  then runs towards the perimeter fence. Here, he scales the fence and disappears into the woodland. You can view the CCTV here: 

In Easter 2015, a truck driver told police that some months ago, he had given a man matching Lars’ description a lift. Where he taken him to is unknown, and  it has never been verified that this was Lars. 

Questions:

1)      Where is Lars’ passport and mobile phone?

2)     Was his room at the hostel searched?

3)     Were the bags he left in the doctor’s office searched?

4)     Who did he get into a fight/fights with?

5)     Who were the 4 men he told his mother about?

6)     Did Lars suffer a head injury during either the beach or McDonalds altercations?

7)     Who was the maintenance man, and why was he in the doctor’s office the same time as Lars?

8)     Why was Lars in with the doctor for so long? Was the doctor persuading him not to fly?

Some Theories

• The most popular theory is that Lars ran into either some members of an organised crime gang, or someone in the organ trafficking business, or possibly both. Once a doctor had established that Lars was alone in the country, and was staying in a dodgy part of town, he was able to have someone follow him (the 4 men that Lars told his mother about in his last phone call) How likely is it that Lars was targeted for the organ black market? I thought it sounded improbable that a German tourist, someone who would be missed, would be a viable target. But then during my research for this post, there was really very little media coverage of the case outside of Germany. Lars’ disappearance seems to be mainly the focus of Reddit threads, with there being little information elsewhere. A report published earlier this year found that there was a perception that Bulgaria had the highest level of corruption out of all the EU countries.      When Lars got to the airport, either the doctor there, or the maintenance man, (both also possibly in on the business) spooked him. This doesn’t explain why he slows to a jog once he’s outside the airport, but does explain why he might have been fearful enough to escape into the woods. From there, he was either caught by the people chasing him, or got lost and succumbed to the elements or to whatever was in the woods - wolves still live in rural Bulgaria
• Lars was a drugs mule. He had swallowed the drugs and was worried the bags would rupture
• Another theory is that during his stay in the hostel, Lars was witness to something he shouldn’t have been. Again, this would explain his odd phone calls to his mother – where he told her he was very freaked out, but couldn’t say by what, other than he was being followed by 4 men
• The next theory is that during one of the fights, Lars suffered a head injury and was experiencing a form of psychosis (where have we heard that one before?) resulting in paranoid delusions. This may account for the belief that he was being followed, and then, when he got to the doctor’s office, that he was going to be harmed
• A last theory is that he had an adverse reaction to the antibiotics, but a bit of reading suggests that temporary psychosis is not a side effect of Cefuroxime 500.  You can read about the side effects here, and judge for yourself:

cefuroxime 500

 So, what do you think happened to Lars? 

Vintage Musings # 1 - 2009

Round the corner from my house, sitting in the middle of a dreary (looking even more dreary in today's non stop drizzle) housing estate, is a parade of shops.

 The Parade has been there at least thirty years - there's the newsagents that forever will be known as Bunce’s, even though it hasn’t been Bunce’s since about 1989 when it changed to Stars and is now called something else like Quik News.   Next to Bunce's is a hairdressers. it's a pretty random place to have a hairdressers and I can't imagine who would go there. My mother did once - 'never again', she said through the kind of tears that can only be induced by a God-awful haircut that means you'll have to spend the next six months hiding under a hat, 'never again!'

Then there's the Supa Price Kutters that sells everything, but marks it all up by about three times the price of what you'd find it for in the supermarket.  They employ strange times of operation in that place - it opens at what feels like 11.55am and then closes at 12pm. Quick-E-Mart it is not. I am foraging for vegetables - as it's such a miserable day I don't know if I can be bothered to get soaking wet walking into town but I am all out of anything tasty and nutritious to eat. They have a decent, fresh-ish bag of mixed salad and some ok, if a bit squidgy tomatoes and some nice red onions but everything else is dreadful - the carrots have the feel of a squeaky dog toy, the lettuce is brown and the green beans are mottled with rot. Next to me is a poor little old lady desperately trying to find some fresh green beans and failing horribly.

 This shop also sells, randomly, a big selection of pet food and own brand fizzy drinks, bird tables, baked Alaska and Findus crispy pancakes, bleach, some organic lime surface cleaner, big bags of Bombay (Mumbai??) mix,  cheap make-up and also has a DVD rental service.  After I’ve bought some earthy looking spuds and a red onion that will probably turn out to be spoiled, I go into Bunce’s, where something a little bit strange and quite funny happens.

There's two teenage girls in there with someone who looks like their mother. But there seems to be some weird, Freaky Friday thing going on. The elder teenage girl is saying:

'what is it you want, then?'

The mother is stood at the magazine racks, her face covered by the pages of an open magazine, she's totally engrossed. She mumbles something inaudible to the teenage girl, but I hear it as: 'I dunno,'

'What?!' the teenage girl barks, in the manner of a posh dog trainer shouting, 'heel!' to an unruly puppy.

'I said I don't know,' says the woman. 'I haven't seen anything,'

'WHAT?' bellows the girl again, and slides over. She tugs at the sleeve of the woman's coat.

'I said I haven't seen anything,' says the woman.

'Come on then,' says the girl, flicking her hair over her shoulder, all exasperated, and they leave the shop. But my Bunce’s experience is not over yet!

  My sister has left a load of her art stuff at dad's house. Today I decided I was going to have a go at being creative (anything to detract from what I am actually supposed to be doing, which is *cringe* writing a novel.) I realised that when I cleared out the old stuff I'd thrown away some of the more useful things like palettes and little wooden spatulas. I thought that the Post office (also sells a vast variety of knitting / sewing stuff) along the parade might have a cheap oil paint set with a palette. They didn't, hence why I had gone into Bunce’s.

'You looking for something?' asks the girl. She says it in a way that suggests I'm on the rob. Her accent is a curious mix  - half Pakistani, half the local, slangy accent, so she drops her aitches and over-pronounces her K's.

 I ask her if they have a paint set.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she says and marches to the front of the shop, from where she produces a set of kids paints in primary colours that are sitting in a plastic box.

‘Uhm, that’s not really what I was -’   I start to say.

‘I know what you’re looking for,’ she says, and rattles the box in my face, like she’s trying to say, ‘these, buy these, you want these,’

‘Uhm, yeah, not really the paints but just a palette,’ I say.

‘Have you tried the post office?’ she demands.

I say that I have and thank her for her help, but I don’t want the paints. I pay for my magazine and run.

On the way home, the two girls and the woman are standing at the bus stop. The woman has adopted the posture of a teenage girl, and is slurping from a Lucozade bottle, standing on one foot, the other bent at the knee, the foot resting on the wall behind her.

‘Linda,’ says the youngest girl - it’s unclear if she’s addressing the older girl or the woman, ‘do you know why I wanted this magazine?’

I don’t hear the rest of the exchange - I am way past the bus stop by then.

I’ve also had a driving lesson today.  It didn’t go well, so I’ll be having to my shopping at the Parade on rainy days for a while longer.

Do What Makes You Happy

In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, record shop owner Rob, who likes making top 5 lists, writes down his top 5 dream jobs.  All but one of the jobs (architect) are impossible, because he’s chosen things like, ‘Journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, 1976 -1979,’

When I was a child, my dream jobs, in no particular chronological / of importance order were:

·         Mounted police officer

I was obsessed with The Bill and with horses, so this seemed like the perfect combination.

·         Film / music journalist

Because then I would get to meet rock stars and actors. I was too young to know that rock stars and actors hate journalists.

·         Band photographer

Because of the mighty Jill Furmanovsky and her beautiful black and white photographs of rock stars.

·         Criminal psychologist

Because of Robbie Coltrane in Cracker and my enduring love for anything police procedural that had the added bonus of being grim and made you want to check all your doors and windows were locked before you went to bed.

·         A writer

Miss Joan Wilder, on her yacht, with her typewriter in Romancing the Stone. I already loved stories, I loved writing stories, I loved stories about writers, I loved the words WRITING and BOOK. Yesterday, I saw this family walking along the high street. Mum, dad, son. The son was trailing a few feet behind, and he was reading as he walked along. That was me. I LOVE it when I see kids reading in weird places; during meals in cafés, in the supermarket, outside shops. Any opportunity to read, and I’d read. I always had a book with me (and mostly still do, because they have in handy when you’re queuing or stopping for coffee, or on a long boring public transport journey, or can’t sleep, or you’re bored, or it’s too wet to go out….I draw the line at reading at the gym, though.)

For years, writing was my thing. It was my calling. I knew I’d never be happy if I did anything else. I worked in a series of undemanding jobs that meant I could write during quiet periods (night reception cover was brilliant for this, as all you had to do was keep one eye on the door and set the early morning wake-up calls.)

I told myself each job was just a way to make money while I was writing. Then I stopped. What I wrote was shit. I didn’t have any stories. I didn’t have any of my own ideas, I didn’t have any of my own characters. This was in the chick-lit boom of the late 90s / early 00s, when Bridget Jones set a precedent for the genre, and many pale imitations followed.

I was trying that sort of writing; girls going on adventures, bitchy bosses, selfish flatmates, bad boyfriends, white wine, Jimmy Choos, bikinis, beaches, hot sex scenes.  Fiona Walker’s books had all of this stuff, AND horses, a bit like a Gen X Jilly Cooper.

 I loved those books, but I wasn’t any good at copying them. Maybe it was because I liked really weird news stories, like the one about the woman who got her hair caught in a swimming pool vent and drowned, while people merrily and obliviously used the pool for several days before she was discovered.

My taste in books has changed over the last 15 -20 years, and I don't read the white wine and happy ending stories anymore.  My heart lies with the gruesome and the strange; a spooky tale, a psychological thriller the cold prickles on the back of your neck; Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Ann Rule, Gillian Flynn, a m homes, Zoe Heller, Ruth Rendell, Bram Stoker, Eerie, Indiana, The Missing, The Enfield Haunting. Really, it was always this way, from when I read The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, The Ghost of Thomas Kemp and The Children of Green Knowe when I was at middle school to The Shining and The Rats in my early teens.

I loved being scared shitless, I loved the feeling that when you closed the mirrored bathroom cabinet, there, behind you, might be a face, the boogeyman, Bloody Mary. 

And this brings me to the crux of this post. Authenticity.

A lot of self-help videos and blogs will go on about how in order to be happy in your work, you need to find your true self, what makes your soul happy, and do that. I have several issues with this.

1)      If we all did what truly made us happy, there would be a lot of people dead, no one to keep the country’s basic facilities running and a lot of make-up vloggers.

2)      Sometimes, you can’t do ‘what makes you happy’ because you have to do boring, adult things, like pay the rent and eat.

3)      Sometimes what would make you happy would be standing on your desk and dancing like Claire in this clip from HBO TV series Six Feet Under. (working in an office was NOT her calling.)

4)      How exactly do you know what your calling actually is?

I don’t KNOW what my calling is, or if I even have one. And that’s why I have ended up, almost twenty years after I left school, in the same meaningless jobs, wondering what I am there for, wondering where my stories went, wondering why I can only write when I don’t have time, or when I am totally miserable.

Finding and following your ‘true calling’ only really works for two kinds of people. The first kind, who know from a very early age that they want to be doctors, nurses, police officers, vets, camera men, solicitors, lawyers, landscape gardeners, builders, mechanics, engineers, and chefs etc. and the second kind; people who have the means / money to tell other people how to be authentic and find their calling and call that a career.

‘Finding your true calling’ is utterly meaningless.  I’m always getting sucked into TED Talks on Youtube. Many of them are very, very good, but the ones about things like, ‘how to find your perfect career’ and ‘what to do with your life’ tend to be someone telling you that if you can’t find perfect career, ‘do what makes you happy’

Oh, OK. So I’ll find a job, then, where someone pays me to get up in the morning, go for a walk in the country, eat cream buns and then write about it. Or, where someone pays me to go to the gym. Or, to hang out at my friends’ houses and play with their babies and drink tea. Or, go to the SoHo Curzon cinema on a Wednesday morning and watch independent films. Or, spend three hours in a stationery shop looking at pens and notebooks. Or, spend half a day in charity shops looking for out of print paperbacks. What’s that, Skip? No-one is going to pay me to do those things? But they make me happy!

They offer no practical advise whatsoever, just a load of guff about how if you want to climb Everest, you should just go ahead and climb Everest. Won’t my wheelchair stop me, though? Only if you let it! You are the barrier, not the wheelchair, pal!

You’re taking it too literally, some might say. What they mean is, find something that you can stand to do for 40 hours a week that you’re vaguely happy doing. Something that doesn’t make you  want to pour boiling water over your arm on Monday morning.

On Tuesday, it will be the start of my third week in a new job. Those of you who know where it is, please keep it quiet. Those who don’t – when I decide whether I’m going to stay or go, and if you’re interested, I’ll tell you. It’s not that it’s a bad place to work – I’m not mining for blood diamonds or treating Ebola victims – it’s just….it’s just it’s the same old officey shit. Everyone’s very nice and friendly, and I am sure there are cliques and politics I don’t know about yet, but I am just not sure I can do it anymore. The 9-5 (or 8.30 til 5.30, in my case, which is actually a really long time to spend sitting in one place wishing you were dead.) that vague feeling of free-floating, nameless dread – is this what I’m here for? The words that strike terror in my heart:

Purchase orders

Productivity

Action plan

Meeting

The ring, ring, ring of reception trying to put someone though to me when I’m on my lunch break (not her fault, she doesn’t know, and it's not her fault that there’s nowhere to really eat lunch apart from your desk) the fact that I have not actually had a full lunch break since I started, and that I actually start at 8 and finish at what’s more like 6. The fact I have had almost no training but I am expected to get on with stuff. The fact I sit there and don’t know what the hell I am doing.

It could be new job blues, I guess.

Or it could be, I’m not being true to my authentic self.

This Whole Thing Was Started With a Dream and a Mouse

I start a new job on Monday. After almost six months off, this is a daunting prospect, especially as I’m not going back to the cosy work family I was part of for ten years.

Last night, I had two nightmares. In the first, I turned up to start my new job. My mentor was a gruff woman who shouted at me when I didn’t understand what she was saying. All these people came into the office kitchen and ate cake, but didn’t do any work. I waited for someone to show me to my desk, tell me what I was doing, start training me. No one did. A few girls made bitchy comments about me and laughed behind my back. Everyone else ignored me. I left without finishing my first day.

I've got a job infiltrating the Triads

In the second dream, I was back in Thailand, except I had my car with me. I was driving down a narrow tunnel /one way street, when my car just stopped and wouldn’t start again. I sat in the car for ages, trying to get it started, before phoning TC and telling him I was stuck and my car wouldn’t start and how was I going to get to my new job on Monday? (never mind the logistics of getting a car back from Thailand by Monday!)

'The Vanishing' 1988 

I love how illogical dreams are while at the same time making perfect sense. If there’s cake in my new work place, I’ll be happy.

Review - 'A Little Life' Hanya Yanagihara - UPDATE

This review comes about a year too late, but here we go anyway. Warning – contains mega spoilers.

Back in March and faced with almost 2 days of non-stop travel, I thought, ‘I need a big book, one of those massive, 700+ page jobs, that will see me through all those tedious hours of waiting for check-ins, waiting to board and the actual flight,’

I chose Hanya Yanagihara’s Man-Booker prize short-listed novel A Little Life, mostly because I had heard so much about it, and how amazing it was.

US edition - the cover photo sums up this review

UK edition cover

The novel follows four twenty-something New York friends, Jude, JB, Malcom and Willem over a period of some 30 odd, curiously timeless years. (there’s mobile phones and computers, but no social media, 9/11 or world politics.)

 At first, I struggled to separate which character was which, and this isn’t helped by Yanagihara (who I will refer to from now on as ‘HY’) playing the pronoun game and starting each chapter with ‘he’ instead of the narrating character’s name.

As for the first 50 or so pages, the four boys were so indistinguishable to me, I found myself flipping back over what I had just read, making notes so I could keep track.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Jude is the character HY has decided to focus on. Poor Jude; not even an Eastender’s character is put through the mill as much as he is. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, he’s taken into a monastery where the monks sexually and physically abuse him for years.

All except for kindly Brother Luke, who love-bombs Jude with encouragement and affection, providing him with a safe place to escape and just be a little boy. Because HY is from the ‘tell’ not ‘show’ school of writing, Brother Luke’s grooming is clear to the reader from the start of their ‘friendship’, and when Brother Luke suggests to a blindly willing Jude that they run away together to build a house in the woods, my heart sank.

Following his time with Brother Luke, which is so unrelentingly grimy I had to stop reading to gather myself and make a comforting cup of tea, Jude’s story gets progressively darker and more twisted, from the home he’s in during his early adolescence, to the truckers he meets on the road, to the sinister doctor he encounters in a service station bathroom, to the bullying, violent, lover he thinks he deserves, Jude's life is a non-stop parade of misery. 

Even after he’s adopted as an adult by Harold and his wife Julia, and meets doctor, Andy, there’s no happiness for Jude.  He is damaged, as you would be if you’d been through what he has been through. He cuts himself, he can’t stand sex or to be touched. Yet he’s also brilliant at absolutely everything he does; cooking, singing, playing the piano, gardening, in his stellar career as a lawyer.

And this is one of the issues among the many that I have with this novel. All of the four friends are wildly successful in their chosen fields; Willem becomes a Hollywood actor, winning Oscars and working with acclaimed directors; JB becomes a famous artist despite only painting portraits of his friends, and Malcolm becomes a famous architect. None of them end up quitting their dreams to get a job in Carpet Right or working in a call centre selling home insurance; none of them simply settle down and have a couple of kids and wash the car on a Sunday (I guess because that would be boring.)

JB and Malcolm’s stories eventually fade so much into the background, you wonder why HY included them in the first place, and then you realise; it’s so they can stand around saying, ‘I’m sorry’ (this book clocks up more ‘I’m sorries’ than 50 Shades does ‘Holy Craps!’) and telling Jude how amazing he is and how much they love him.

The amount of shit the three friends, Andy and Harold tolerate from Jude exasperated me. They seemed to give him so much time, such unquestioning, unconditional understanding and loyalty, and he never once gives it back. He lies to them, he tells them nothing about himself, he gives nothing away, he’s stubborn, and he treats them like shit.

In part, you can tell yourself that this is because this is who Jude is, a person who does not believe that they are worthy of being loved, but I found it amazing that his friends, who he treats so poorly for so long, would stick by him, for a massive 30 plus years.  They don’t know anything about the abuse he went though as a child, so they don’t even have the information to decide, ‘this is why Jude is why he is.’ The only knowledge they have of Jude's past is that he had a life-altering accident that disabled him, but even the details of this are hidden from them, and the reader, until towards the end of the book. 

Andy is perpetually, literally, putting Jude back together again, over and over again, stitching wounds and setting bones, asking the slimmest of questions and accepting the scantiest of answers. It drove me mad that Andy’s character was a doctor, and it felt like he was only there to provide Jude with 24/7 healthcare without asking any awkward questions. In short, being the total opposite of what every decent doctor would do, staying quiet when he should be talking, doing nothing when he has a duty to his patient to take action.

There’s actually little evidence of Jude’s amazingness, beyond his ability to survive the most awful of abuses, bake excellent cakes and be brilliant at everything he turns his hand to.

Jude is destined to spend the entire novel hating himself, feeling dirty, cutting himself so badly he almost dies, and surviving two suicide attempts.

I really, really, wanted to Jude to finally decide he was worthy of getting help and realise that he was loved and nothing that happened to him was his fault. I really wanted him to be more than his abuse, but HY was never going to let that happen.

Not much of Jude’s story really rang true for me. He didn’t need to have so much abuse thrown at him to be damaged, and his damage did not need to make up the totality of his character.

I would question how a child who grew up in ‘care’ and without the nurture and solid foundations of a healthy mother/child relationship could slide so easily into a successful career and into close friendships. The truth is, Jude doesn’t. His friendships are as shallow and one-sided as you’d expect from a child who never really learned how to interact with other children, yet this isn’t an area the author chooses to explore at all.  

Jude also displays zero curiosity about who his parents might have been / are, and in fact I am not sure it’s ever even mentioned with the exception of it not being clear what his racial heritage is (we know it’s mixed, and that’s the extent of it.)

Jude’s relationship with an abusive older partner, in particular, was handled badly, and I felt that little to no research had been done by the author about the creeping, insidious nature of domestic violence and of domestic abusers.

None of the characters rang true for me; there’s not one that feels like a fully formed person you would know,  and have encountered in your own life. They just seem to be there purely to propel Jude’s narrative. The most honest moment in the book comes courtesy of JB. Lost and drug-addicted, he does a cruel impression of Jude and boy, he is never let off the hook for that one, because you’re not allowed to mock someone as fragile and broken as Jude.

I am actually infuriated thinking about just how shallow each character is. They are all so good, with the exception of JB’s brief time as a drug addict. They have no faults, no pettiness, no moments of dickheadishness that make up the human experience. They are constantly there for Jude, at any time, at any hour, despite having lives (and in Andy’s case, kids,) of their own.

I just wanted one of them, ONE, who when summoned to the hospital for the fiftieth time after Jude had done something disgusting to himself yet again to go, ‘Actually, it’s 3am and I have finally got to sleep, after being woken up 5 times already, so I am not going to come to the hospital to see Jude, I’ve got baby sick on my shoulder and I’ve not slept for six months, I HAVE A LIFE TOO, YOU KNOW!!!’

It takes 97% of the way through the book (I read the Kindle edition, so don’t know what page number this was) before HY finally gives Jude a break and lets him die.

Soon after that, all his close friends also die, all youngish in their late 50s and early 60s because NO-ONE IS ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY AND NORMAL AND WASH THEIR CAR ON A SUNDAY AND TAKE THEIR GRANDCHILDREN TO THE SEASIDE OR WATCH A FILM WITH A CUP OF TEA AND BISCUIT FOR DUNKING OR ANYTHING NICE LIKE THAT.

Spindly plot and poor characterisation aside, the writing isn’t that great. I felt that HY was trying to emulate the style of Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Goldfinch) Most novice writers do this - it’s a means of flexing your writing muscles and finding your own style - but this is HY second novel. Each over-descriptive, meandering paragraph reads like HY was wondering to herself how Tartt would have written the same book (better, is probably the answer, child abandonment and neglect being covered in The Goldfinch.)

There was far too much needless detail about dinners and the lives of the bit-player characters, and this was detail that could have been given to fully exploring Jude’s psychology further, beyond ‘sexual abuse fucks you up’. What about how being abandoned as a baby would fuck you up? About how not knowing who you are, where you come from, not having any normal relationships until you are in your 20s?

HY isn’t interested in this, she’s interested in the unrelenting, grim torture that abusers meter out to Jude and the cruelty he later inflicts on himself as a result.

Are there good things about the book? Yes. We are not given graphic, detailed descriptions of Jude’s abuse, and what is revealed is dealt with sparingly and very matter of factly.  The portions of the book about Jude’s early childhood are very good, his typical childish trust in adults and their motivations, his misunderstanding of the mysterious adult world is heart-breaking, and despite the awfulness of what happens to him at the monastery, I found those sections of the book the most interesting and vividly drawn.

I liked the fact that there’s no clear time setting (other than it’s obviously ‘modern’ times) to the novel - I imagined that the four friends met at college in the late 1980s / early 90s – but another reader could place them as first meeting in the 1970s. There’s little mention of technology or politics to provide a timescale. It’s not really clear why the author chooses to do this – I believe possibly so the book won’t ‘age’ and the story can speak for itself, instead of being a comment on  late 20^th / early 21^st century life.

I started this book on 14^th March and finished it today (2 May) It never normally takes me so long to read a book, even one as long as this. It felt like what it is; a slow, tedious, trudge through the thick sludge of an awful life, while someone hits you over the head with MEANINGS made of breeze blocks. 

I stayed with it because I had already invested time and money in it, but there are probably authors out there who have tackled this subject more competently and meaningfully. 

1/5.....'sorry'. (not sorry). 

Now for the updated bit...

I love reading bad reviews of books. Love it. In my search for reviews on this book, I discovered that the cover photo is called 'Orgasmic Man'. I have to say that a thought had occurred to me when I kept seeing the cover...is he in pain...or is he...? He looks like he might be....? Or at the very least it's a cry wank, maybe? 

So yeah, that cover photo more sums up what I think of the book (load of wank) than my review of the book. 

I probably shouldn't rush to review things when I'm pissed off with the author for mucking me around and wasting my time, because later I think, oh it wasn't  THAT bad.  

It actually wasn't that bad, I take back that the writing wasn't that good. I would have just liked to have read what this book could have been with some more ruthless editing and with less focus on Jude.

I might read Hanya Yanagihara's first book, so watch this space....